A woman, some say, was so moved by the prisoner’s circumstances that she managed to pass some scraps of meat to him through the bars of his cell, but when this was discovered she was put to death. Another woman gave him milk from her breast, through a long reed, and she too was killed when her mercy was detected.
Then was the Duke of Rothesay ‘destitute of all mortal supply’, and was brought, finally, to such miserable and desperate hunger that he ate not only the filth of the tower where he was being kept, but also his own fingers.
Rothesay’s body was buried at nearby Lindores, where for some years miracles associated with him were reputed to take place.
An inquiry into the circumstances of his death exonerated the Duke of Albany from any suggestion of wrongdoing.
These events took place six hundred years ago. I had written as far as this point, and was wondering where I was being taken, when a friend emailed with the news that he had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. He has been given a sentence – of life, of death – of between six and twelve months.
That is all.
4 December
The First Novel
This morning I received in the post a parcel containing a book and a letter. The book was a novel – a first novel, it transpired – and I recognised the author’s name at once: one of my boys, from all those years ago. I opened it and on the title page was a handwritten dedication – to me! Signed by the author – one of my boys!
I turned eagerly to the letter. It had been written with a proper pen, in black ink, and bore traces of the italic hand I insisted on being taught to every pupil in the school. I always said that, though a boy might later abandon the strict italic form, yet it would remain a steadying, underlying influence, ensuring, at the very least, neatness and legibility.
I remembered the author quite well: a bright, pale-faced boy, not the most intelligent pupil I ever had but certainly not a dunce or a sluggard. He always turned in a good essay. Yes, he knew how to write an essay, but I never imagined he would one day produce an entire novel! Yet here it was, his first, and he had sent a signed copy to me, his old English teacher and headmaster. I was pleased, and flattered too by the contents of the letter. He recalled my lessons – he thanked me for my encouragement – he said that I had left my mark.
Towards the end of the letter he warned that I might find some of the language in his novel strong, and some of his depictions explicit. He would not want to offend me. I was a little alarmed, but surely he would not have sent me the book if it really was offensive?
But oh, when I began to read it! I am old, and no doubt old-fashioned, but not, I hope, a prude. This, however, was too much. The obscenities were overwhelming, the subject matter poisonous. Perhaps he really does mean to insult me. And I am hurt, and ashamed that one of my boys should lower himself to such depths. I feel betrayed, and have laid the book aside. I can hardly think that I shall acknowledge receipt of it.
5 December
Cathedral
On the side of the piazza opposite the cathedral, a man with his legs on back to front is adopting stretching positions on his mat. The tourists gather in clusters here every minute, hundreds of them by the hour, trying to squeeze as much of the cathedral’s vast facade into their viewfinders as they can. The man wears a vest so that his muscular arms and shoulders are very visible, and gleaming Spandex shorts which display the weirdness of his legs to best advantage. You look away and then you look again. You can’t help it. He wants you to look. Perhaps he even has the power to make you look. This is his trade. Is he a contortionist of extraordinary and disturbing skill, or are the legs truly deformed? At any rate, they are how he earns a living.
There is something medieval about him, something that links him to the cathedral gargoyles sticking out tongues and pulling faces at the crowds below. Even as he stretches and bends and straightens on his mat he seems to rebuke, to be making a gesture of contempt in the very face of sophisticated, civilised society. I am the freak that you fear lurks within yourselves. Pay me or suffer the consequences of your own grotesque humanity.
You feel in your pocket but you have no loose change, only paper money, and you are not so moved or ashamed or afraid to reach for your wallet. The man with his legs on back to front pays you no more attention once he sees that expression in your eyes. You were almost nothing to him before, you are nothing now. He turns his head and his body coquettishly to someone more deserving, more susceptible than you.
And this is Florence, the cradle of modernity, the start of it all, the slow crawl up from ignorance and brutal curiosity. This is the city of Michelangelo, Botticelli, Dante, Machiavelli and Vasari, where knowledge and art became steps out of darkness, where truth was sought but not accepted without debate, where the light of reason flooded in.
The man with his legs on back to front is a warning, a reminder.
6 December
Consumer Blues
There’s a rumour going round, we don’t know what it is, but we all get in line. Could be one thing, could be another, but we all get in line. They’re probably selling something, they must be selling something, so we all get in line.
Maybe it’s a bargain, maybe it’s a con, but we all get in line. A pocketful of diamonds or half a pound of mince, but we all get in line. We won’t know what we’re missing if we turn and walk away, so we all get in line.
There’s nothing more we need, the house is full of crap, but we all get in line. No room in the closets, the garage walls are bulging, but we all get in line. Someone says she’s seen it, someone says it’s cool, so we all get in line.
They’re chopping down the forests and slicing up the mountains, but we all get in line. Half the world is starving and living under cardboard, but we all get in line. And if they want to count our dirty carbon footprints, we’ll all get in line.
There are seven billion birthdays, and Christmas round the corner, so we all get in line. Instant payday credit, and a pawnshop up the alley, so we all get in line. But you never know your luck, there’s a winner every minute, so we all get in line.
The country folk are leaving and moving to the city, where they all get in line. It’s so hard to make a living but they hear it can be done, so they all get in line. And we’re running out of oil, and we’re running out of water, so we all get in line.
There’s talk of revolution, and anarchy and war, and it’s coming down the line. You don’t know who to trust or which side to be on, if it’s coming down the line. But there’s a man in a truck selling guns and insurance, and he’s coming down the line.
And the government is saying there’s a threat to law and order but no one will get hurt, arrested or imprisoned – if we all stay in line.
7 December
The Clock of Horror
The clock that hung in the hallway was not behaving. It didn’t like the winter. The fall in temperature affected it, causing the brass pendulum or the hands or some other part of the mechanism to slow. First it didn’t make it through the cold hours of the night. Then it had trouble during the day. Its tick faded, then stopped, the minute hand finding the uphill journey from six to twelve too much.
‘Did you restart the clock?’ he demanded one night. He knew he sounded aggressive.
‘I haven’t touched it,’ she answered, almost as sharply. They were going through the hall on their way to bed.
‘Well, somebody has. I set it going at eight but it stopped again at ten to nine. Now it’s saying twenty to ten.’
‘So?’
‘I didn’t restart it at ten to nine. I just left it.’
‘I didn’t touch it.’
‘Somebody has. Look, the case hasn’t been closed.’
‘You must have forgotten to close it after you set it going.’
‘I always close it.’
‘On this occasion you must have forgotten.’
There was the possibility of a fight. He drew back.
‘Aye, may
be. I was sure I closed it.’
She acknowledged the concession. ‘It has a mind of its own, that clock.’
‘It plays tricks on us,’ he agreed. He adjusted the hands, letting the clock strike ten and eleven before he swung the pendulum, then closed the case.
They switched the downstairs lights out and went up. He opened the bedroom window and turned down the covers while she was in the bathroom. They passed on the landing. The clock’s steady tick was below them.
‘It’s lulling us into a false sense of security,’ she said.
‘As soon as we’re asleep, it’ll stop,’ he said.
Later, in the darkness, she said, ‘Are you awake?’
‘Aye.’
‘It’s ten past midnight. Did the clock strike?’
‘I didn’t hear it.’
‘Yet I still hear ticking. You know what I think? That clock’s come down from the wall and up the stairs, and it’s waiting for us out there.’
‘The Clock of Horror,’ he said, inventing a movie title.
They lay still, neither of them wanting to move till daylight.
8 December
Ice
When we came off the backshift he’d already been dead eight hours. The guys coming in for the nightshift told us. ‘Didn’t you hear the news?’ But how could we have heard, working in the ice factory? The ice came crashing down the chute every eighteen minutes and we bagged it as fast as we could go, no time to talk, no time to listen, and with the noise of the next load of ice being made and the roar of the bagging machine and the banging of the staple gun and then in the muffled silence of the freezer where we stacked the bags feeling the cold wet ache of your fingers and the ache of your back and the sweat that crusted on you in the freezer – well, there wasn’t any room for news. Even on our breaks we didn’t have a radio, and we were too tired for talk. The only person who came in was the fish man wanting ice, and he just handed over cash and took his ice away in crates, a dollar a crate, and he never said anything, not even thank you. So how could we have known that he was dead, John Lennon, dead, on another continent on another day in another time zone? We heard it from the guys coming in for the nightshift.
I walked back through the city in a daze, and went for a beer because I needed one. I wanted to be on my own, but I wasn’t alone. Everybody else in the bar was in a daze too, and we all sat drinking and listening to the music, the Beatles and John on his own and John with Yoko, starting over. After the first beer I had a second, and then a third, and then I went home.
All that summer in Sydney I made ice, and every day it hurt but I got fitter and stronger. And every day on my way to the ice factory I passed a wall on which someone had sprayed the words AFTER ALL I’M ONLY SLEEPING. And I knew that part of my life was over, and that the rest was going fast.
9 December
The People of the Plain
The people of the plain built their houses low, one storey tall or sometimes with only half a storey above ground, and the rest of the accommodation below it. He who built a two-storey house was considered daring but arrogant. These people had a god who lived in the sky, though none had ever seen him. They only felt his breath, which was the wind and which blew without cease. Sooner or later it blew away the arrogance of humans. Always.
The people of the plain had long traded with people from the mountains. In exchange for meat, cheese and wool from their herds of goats and sheep, they received timber. They used the timber for firewood and for houses, which they built so that the wind would flow over them without causing too much damage. They covered the roofs with wooden tiles, nailing each tile with three nails: one for summer, one for winter and the third for luck.
They were small people, with flattened foreheads and a permanent stoop from walking into the breath of their god. Most of the year it was a warm breath, but in winter it came from the north, icy or snow-laden. Then they brought their beasts indoors and asked their god not to rip their roofs off before spring.
The mountain people asked them why they did not move. In the mountains, although the seasons were more varied and unpredictable, the valleys were well protected from the wind. The people of the plain said they could not leave their god. If they did, he would be very angry and sure to punish them.
The mountain people did not understand. They had no god. The people of the plain liked them, but considered them foolish children.
One spring only a few people came from the mountains to trade. Terrible calamities had befallen them. First, in late summer, a fire had destroyed much of the forest, then winter floods had swept through the valleys, drowning nearly everybody.
The people of the plain gave thanks. They knew they had been right to stay where they were. And their god blew his warm breath on them, and they stooped before it.
10 December
The Critic
It had to happen. Somebody had to say, eventually, ‘But they’re not very good, are they?’
‘In what way?’ he said, reminding himself that everybody was entitled to an opinion.
‘They’re all the same. I thought each one would be different.’
‘They are different.’
‘But so many of the words crop up again and again.’
‘I think that’s inevitable with words, don’t you?’
‘You make the inevitable sound like something one should feel relaxed about.’
‘Well, there doesn’t seem much point in getting stressed about it. It depends on your expectations.’
‘That’s the problem,’ the critic admitted. ‘It’s my own fault. I’m always looking for the best and so I’m always disappointed.’
She fell into contemplation, then resumed. ‘I used to know a painter, very successful in a commercial sense, and a man who could actually paint, which very few painters can. He painted fishing villages. That was what he was known for – little old houses and brightly coloured boats, lobster creels and fish boxes, and nets hung up to dry. Some of the villages he painted were in Fife, some were in Cornwall, and others were in France or Spain, but the thing was, after a while they all looked the same. He had to start putting in clues, like signs written in Spanish, or a Cornish flag. But they still sold. In fact he couldn’t paint them fast enough. I visited him once in his studio. He had six canvases set up in a row, and he was going from one to the next putting in red bits, then back in the other direction putting in blue bits. He seemed quite optimistic but it made me despair. Do you feel optimistic?’
Up until this point he hadn’t wanted to engage in the conversation, he’d wanted the critic to take her opinion somewhere else, far away. But this question got under his skin.
‘No, not really,’ he said. ‘Most of the time I don’t. There isn’t a lot to be optimistic about.’
Her mood suddenly brightened. ‘I agree. That painter couldn’t see that. I shall have to read these again. Perhaps there is more to them than I’m seeing.’
‘Perhaps there is,’ he said.
11 December
Our Main Stories Again
Now here are our main stories again, and I should warn you that some of these are accompanied by flashes of inconsequence:
Latest opinion polls indicate that if a General Election were held tomorrow the result would be a coalition between Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor. Politicians from all parties welcomed the findings, saying they were encouraged that so many people were having fun while engaging in the electoral process. The government is considering lowering the minimum voting age to three, or doing away with it altogether.
More than ten million viewers are expected to watch the next series of Dr Who when it appears on the nation’s television screens, to find out if anything interesting happens when one doctor is transformed into another. The world-famous time-travelling medic is not a real doctor, which may surprise some viewers.
It has emerged that while some people find twerking, the sexually provocative form of dancing which involves thrusting, bending an
d squatting movements, distasteful and demeaning to women, other people don’t.
The retail sector has received a welcome boost, with plenty of crap in the shops and plenty of customers willing to buy it. Some shoppers are so keen to snap up bargains that they have queued overnight in order to have the best chance of being interviewed on this programme about queuing overnight for the bargains they hope to snap up.
Millions of people are desperate to know how Sherlock Holmes survived after leaping off a roof at the end of the last series of Sherlock. The world-famous detective is not a real detective, which may surprise some viewers.
The arms trade, state surveillance, environmental destruction, global inequalities, even a serious story or two about culture? Naaah.
And news just in, our top story is …
Well, we thought it was going to be the one about voting intentions but overwhelmingly you have texted and tweeted us to say that it was too complicated so it has been dismissed from the show by our expert panel of judges, and the winning story tonight is …
… the one about twerking!
Congratulations, twerkers everywhere. And remember, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Good night.
12 December
What the Old Wife Said
‘Now, you know about clootie wells, do you? These are wells usually with a tree growing beside them, and the water from the well has special healing properties. People come from far and wide to get the benefit. They come with all kinds of ailments and they dip a cloot or rag into the water and tie it to a branch of the tree, and perhaps say a prayer or perhaps not, and as the rag dries and fades and reduces over time so the ailment goes away. Or if a person is too ill to make the journey a friend or relative may bring something of theirs to dip into the well and then tie it in the tree, and the illness diminishes. Sometimes a clootie well is associated with a saint or a spirit, and sometimes no one knows why the tradition grew in this or that location, but the site is always very ancient. And where the tradition survives there is no sign of it coming to an end, not even in these enlightened times!
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